Starting on an OLPC Project

ContributorProjects provide new and creative ways to enhance the educational experience of the OLPC program. Past projects have included the development of creative activities and software; the creation of content, collections, and resources; the testing and assessment of other ideas; and a wide variety of related work--from the theoretical to the experimental.

Below you can see a list of active projects already underway contributing to the OLPC vision. Click on the name of any linked activity for detailed information about its design and development status. If you are a contributor, please make sure that your project is listed in one of the sections below or on a related page.

Selected projects

Project descriptions

We are currently in need of 30 laptops to case study Scratch in the public schools. The purpose of this project is to study the effects of computer programming in the classrooms. The Problem is NSF reports the Educational frameworks must teach students innovation and creativity in the science and math curriculums for new technologies to thrive. A fundamental shift of views about knowledge and expertise and learning requires reconsideration and to redesign our formal educational system. The objective is to actively engage learners to construct their own ideas. The National Science Foundation (NSF) reports the root of the problem comes from the educational framework and curriculum that has to be re-worked and MUST focus on teaching creativity and innovation

As the US continues to strive toward building capacity for a highly educated workforce in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, educational organizations have constructed frameworks that outline critical STEM literacy’s that need to be cultivated in K-12 education in order to achieve this goal. The central question for effective science teaching is how we can teach better scientific reasoning, allowing our students to do more than observe phenomena, push equations, and flounder in inconsistencies between everyday knowledge and the reasoning of science. Learning is an active process in which people construct new understandings of the world around them through active exploration, experimentation, discussion, and reflection.

The Significance of this case study is preparing our future for a technologically advanced society

The ability to integrate technology in the mathematics classroom is essential for future elementary grade school teachers as they enter the classroom being required to be able to prepare students for a technologically advanced society. How teachers learned subject matter is not necessarily the way their student will need to be taught in the 21st century. A fundamental shift about knowledge and expertise and learning requires a redesign of our formal educational system and pedagogy. TIMMS 2007 key educational outcomes in the Group of Eight (G-8) countries show 15 year old American students are scoring lower on average than many of their G-8 peers on each of the three science literacy subscales; identifying scientific issues, explaining phenomena scientifically, and using scientific evidence.

Golden Hour Project, Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh (mentoring notes) - The objective of the Golden Hour Project is to utilize the XO laptops to expand educational opportunities to children who live in the remote mountainous areas in Bangladesh, known as the Chittagong Hill Tracts. This isolated area, where poverty and malnutrition pervade, is inhabited by thirteen indigenous tribes and whose literacy rates are lowest in the nation, even for a country like Bangladesh. The indigenous tribal children live scattered on mountaintops and only have access to a few schools with severely limited resources. The Golden Hour Project will make it possible for these children to access better and more comprehensive primary school education. More details and a website will follow soon.

OLPC Somaliland - Somaliland is one of the poorest, underdeveloped countries in the world. The most recent statistics show that the total enrolment in primary and secondary schools in Somaliland was 200,000 (less than 20% of all school aged children). The Somaliland ministry of education hopes to increase literacy levels across the country to 75 percent by 2015. Currently there are no resources available for students to aid with their learning after school throughout Somaliland, and students often go to the streets rather than complete their homework/projects. We see OLPC Somaliland as an initiative, which will aim to improve both teaching and learning standards in some of the poorest schools in Somaliland. We hope that launching OLPC Somaliland will ameliorate the government’s target to increase literacy and numeracy rates of school-aged children.

Peter Hewitt - Activity Developer (Journal) - My aim is to use the game development skills I have developed over the years and my considerable experience as a teacher to create exciting and useful activities. I'm concentrating on using no text at all so my activities are truly international. I would greatly appreciate feedback from anyone making use of my activities. They are all available at Sugar Labs.

One Laptop Per - Teacher Educator, Student Teacher, Class Teacher - Child: Moneague College St. Ann, Jamaica (blog) - The Moneague College is a teacher training institution, preparing student teachers to become class teachers in the Jamaican education system. The college has joined the OLPC Jamaica Team committing to introduce Sugar and the XOs to the student teachers who will then use Sugar activities in their lessons on teaching practice for 5 subjects: Math, Language Arts, Science, Music and Physical Education. The goal is to create a bank of lesson plans and videos that would be accessed by local teachers when Sugar and XOs come to them. More specifically, the student teachers and their lesson plans will assist class teachers at two Kingston schools (Providence Basic and August Town Primary) where the OLPC Jamaica team from the University of the West Indies (UWI) Mona has XO deployments.

Rehnuma Public School Karachi - Collaborative Learning and Peer to Peer Teaching (blog) - Our objective is to demonstrate not only that OLPC laptops can greatly enhance education in a neighborhood school for poor children, but to test a new plan providing education using OLPC computers, by assigning three students per computer. The students will be on a sixth grade level. Children will be grouped into groups of three, called trios, by their teacher. Each trio should have a child identified by the teacher from the high, low and middle level of accomplishment. The children's tasks will be shared, hopefully with the higher level children teaching the lower level children as well as acquiring the skills of sharing, teaching, articulating, which will further advance their own skills.

Fargo to Sudan: After school to Sudanese School (blog) - This project will work to improve the after school program at Madison Elementary School in Fargo ND, a school with a large refugee population, and in turn pass the XOs on to a school in southern Sudan. Project goals will focus on training a deployment team, getting kids in Fargo to develop content for kids in Sudan, and exploring language-learning tools within Sugar. An open source Rosetta Stone is needed.

Roadshow In A Box-Update - This is a much needed update. Now that the XO-1.5 has come out, it is time to include some of these new machines in the Roadshow. Since it was first started in 2008, the Roadshow In A Box Project has reached hundreds, or perhaps even thousands, of people at conventions and conferences in the Southern California area. Workshops and demonstrations have been presented at locations in both California and Montana. The Roadshow started with 3 XO-1s plus the project leader's G1G1 machine. Additional broken laptops that were repaired were added to increase the number of machines available for workshops and the project has been able to make short term loans of a few laptops to people and groups interested in planning their own project. These activities will continue with the addition of the "latest XO-1.5 technology."

The Next Hope 2010 outreach - The objective of this project by a member of OLPC-NYC is to get participants at this widely known conference up-to-date, informed and excited about the activities and opportunities at OLPC.

V2X Speech Recognition and Voice Synthesis - This project aims at building an efficient speech recognition and voice synthesis toolkit and a suite of applications using this toolkit in education domain. Project proposal details can be checked at my blog. Please join the team if you are interested in this project. Drop me a mail at shirish.goyal@gmail.com

Prakash Educational Software Package (ESP) (blog) - The objective of the project is to sugarize Prakash Educational Software Package (ESP) in order to run on XO laptops. Originally developed in Microsoft C#.NET, the software package consists of three applications viz. Guided Writing, Multi Point and eScribe. Each of the application is designed in such a way to target a specific learning skill of an individual and caters to the learning competencies of primary school children i.e. reading, writing, listening and speech skills. Furthermore, one of the applications also utilises the concept of Multi Point that enables multiple mice input in an application and allows collaborative learning between children. To mould these applications for XO Laptops, these need to be re-developed using Mono to sugarize C#. Project WebsitePrototype video (currently being built in .NET to accomplish the purpose) Project Proposal

Language Documentation and XO Laptops The participants are currently documenting several languages in the Southwest of the island of Ambrym, Vanuatu. The project work involves audio and video recordings, which will lead to the production of dictionaries, story books and grammars for the previously undocumented and undescribed languages. Due to the lack of devices with the capacity to display accustic and visual information, however, local communities will hardly have access to the audio and video recordings. Also, the opportunities for speakers to actively participate in the documentation of their languages and traditional knowledge themselves are very limited. The laptops provided by the OLPC project would help to make recordings accessible to the communities as well as empower the youngest generations to use modern technologies to explore and record the traditional knowledge which is in acute danger of being lost.

Competitive Learning within a Mesh Network - The project's aim is to develop an activity framework for competitive learning and training activities over the mesh network. Two or more teams within a learning environment compete against each other. They can see the training effort of their own and of the other teams, compare their own achievements, gain awards for achieving teacher defined training goals. They see in real time which team members of their own or other teams are actively workin at the moment and which challenges their team and the other teams are actually facing. So pupils can be motivated to train their skills in a special way. You are encouraged to integrate your own activities into the framework. Our progress will be posted on our blog.

Squeakland Testers - The projects goal is to have a dedicated user test group for planned Etoys releases. This user test group will run tests of the future release of Etoys against planned release of Sugar and the XO hardware. Progress will be posted on Squeakland's blog.

Computers of the Dominican Republic - My project will provide educational and recreational opportunities for the kids in Los Tocones de las Galeras de Semaná, the Dominican Republic, by providing them with used baseball equipment and basic computers.

Big Sky Science Partnership is a pilot project bringing XO laptops into the classrooms of elementary teachers on and near the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Reservations in Montana. The XO laptops will be used to provide Internet access to each student and the Sugar software will provide the student an avenue for expressing and publishing their knowledge of science topics. Through the Sugar mixed media activities teachers will assist students in gaining an understanding of how their rural communities are interconnected with others as they investigate the natural world and science processes.

Version support for Sugar data store (XO-1.5 project page) - Storing previous versions of user documents inside the Sugar data store ensures no work is accidently lost due to being overwritten. Accessing past versions is presented to the user as "going back in time" for a specific Journal object.

Intelligent Learning Framework - This project aims to develop a framework which can be used by games (sugar activities) to support the learner during the game. The framework is the pedagogic intelligence behind the game. The game should adapt itself to the learner, how to adapt decides the framework which monitors the actions of the learner and draws conclusions about the behavior of the learner.

Summer pyGames - This project aims to involve high school students, South Carolina's education system, and a number of private businesses to create educational computer games for the XO laptop. The group is working closely with CSCLUG and Palmetto Project to distribute the free software games to 3,000 South Carolina students and offer the games to download! Kick-off for the competition starts Saturday, June 11 2010 and the competition concludes July 24th 2010.

Open Video Chat @ RIT - Developers sponsored by PEN International will be charged with developing a proof of concept by improving the underlying software stack to provide video chat functionality for communication between deaf and hard of hearing students in a classroom environment. Documentation of the process and the development team's experience will be released on an ongoing basis--live when possible--and will culminate at the terminus of the project with an open source video production to be released and viewed at the NTID Technology Symposium and FOSScon RIT this summer. BLOG #1BLOG #2https://fedorahosted.org/OpenVideoChat/http://innovation.rit.edu/?tag=openvideochat

AMAGEZI GEMAANYI - KNOWLEDGE IS POWER - to promote the Amagezi Gemaanyi Computer Lab as a safe learning space for children (ages 6-11) and youth (ages 12-20) by implementing a project that will supplement the Ugandan Primary and Secondary School reading, writing, and mathematics syllabus using the interactive games and applications within the XO laptop as a fun, innovative teaching aid. Visit our Blog for information on our organization AMAGEZI GEMAANYI YOUTH ASSOCIATION

Got Game?! Web Version - A service learning project between high school students in Texas and students in Ghana using XO laptops as a communication tool to create relationships and educational math tools while supporting the Touch A Life organization's goal of educating the world on child slavery and human trafficking. Check out our progress at New Tech Gives Back

XO 1.5 Media Effort Helping out with raising media awareness for the upcoming release of the XO 1.5. Showcase capabilities, compare with the XO 1, make everyone interested in jumping aboard, even the non-programmers.

XO Operating System Special Interest Group Creating and nurturing a community of contributors within Sugar Labs with knowledge and experience developing for the XO. Raising raise the visibility and importance of the XO within the Sugar community.... without violating upstream/downstream abstraction barriers.

OLPC UK Pilot - London 2009 In developing OLPC (UK) we aim to establish a 100% volunteer organization and platform for OLPC in the United Kingdom. The intent of OLPC (UK) is to support the deployments of XO computers towards solving defined needs in UK schools paired with schools in developing countries.

Notalon: Note-Taking Software Notalon is note-taking, simplified. Its aim is to streamline your focus on taking notes on books and during class lectures.

The Development of the GreenThumb Activity The game allows an avenue for the conducting of biological/genetic-related experiments. It gives the player the chance to choose his/her own preferences in the various factors that will affect the experiment.

OLPC Vietnam project is progressing to a full fledge OLPC project by building a supporters community and bringing communities, educational institutions and officil partners together. Ultimate goal of the project is a large scale deployment to support and foster the change of frontal teachers centralized methods to a learner and learning focused methodology in Vietnam. OLPC Vietnam support a holistic approach that puts students in the center and fosters active participation, learning in the digital society and using IT for a change to the better.

GaiaBB - distributed Social Networks GaiaBB aims to be an easily modifiable, localizable peer to peer forum. The idea is to allow kids to create their own social networks, and easily share them with friends (online and offline).

OLPC Deployment to Mafi Dove, Ghana Starting with a planned deployment of at least 20 XOs to the middle school in this rural village in Ghana, we hope to expand to their entire school over time, and then work out to neighboring villages.

Sankamup - News distribution and production facilitation Sankamup is initially targetted at the island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, which suffered major setbacks in education and communications as the result of a protracted civil war. Sankamup looks to address wireless communications issues, local language support; and the porting of Scribus an Opensource Desktop publishing application, and Celtx an Opensource application for Scriptwriting and other Pre-production activities - to facilitate "tribal" storytelling and capture.

Turtle Art Curriculum Project of Olin College. This lab-based curriculum is designed to teach a variety of math and engineering concepts through Turtle Art. It will be running for the first time as a after school program for 3rd - 5th graders at John Eliot Elementary School in Needham, MA in spring 2010.

Kenya Measuring XO Discovery Learning HOC teams will teach a math curriculum designed during the last 5 months using XO Turtle Art and Pippy problem solving learning tasks to demonstrate student skill development made using the XO in conventional Kenyan exams (CATs). After school and weekend XO access will provide additional learning time.

XO supported education within Serachour, Nepal XO supported education within Serachour, Nepal (Kaski district) in May 2010 consisting of 40 laptops. Serachour village is a farming community of around 600 inhabitants situated 25 km west of the city of Pokhara in the foothills of the Himalayas. The objective of the project is: Computer supported education within the primary school in Serachour, Nepal based on a sustainable model. See Foundation Making Miles for Millennium

English for Everybody - Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. The new Educational Law to be approved in the next 2 or 3 months, states that all schools will have to teach 3 Languages (Spanish, an originary language (Guarani in our case) and another foreign language - (English is the most commonly used).To help students from the Public Schools (approximately 300 000),we are going to develop a curriculum for them to learn English with the help of XOs and hopefully to use this program to teach other languages (to start with Guarani for example). We hope this project will assist language learners worldwide. BLOG

eKindling Teacher Training Program - The goal of this project is to utilize the XO laptops to pilot a training program designed to build the capacity of educators, tech squad (comprised of 4th grade students) and support team – key stakeholders that will be participating in the first OLPC deployment (100 XO Laptops) in the Philippines. This deployment, which is projected to start in July, will focus on two schools - Lubang Integrated School and Maligaya Elementary School - located in the rural island of Lubang, Mindoro. The training session is schedule 3 months in advance of the pilot to get the teachers comfortable with the technology and take advantage of the summer vacation to create and upload content into the school server. Ultimately, we hope to create a shareable blueprint/manual for future training programs that can be replicated inside and outside the Philippines. Updates will be posted on our blog and on Twitter: [1]. The project page is located in [2]

Health and Wellness Eduction for Children in Rural Communities BLOGOriginal proposal - Our project will develop activities to teach children in rural, isolated regions about health and wellness, in general, and to help them become caring adults, in particular. Initially, we will target 1st graders. The project will address strategies to prevent abuse by increasing child resiliency, and to improve health by teaching obesity prevention. We will also incorporate culturally sensitive, animal-human relationship lessons to improve the likelihood of decreasing trans-generational child maltreatment. The project will be carried out by an interdisciplinary team of computer scientists, educators, and child advocacy specialists.

Marysville Rotary XO Literacy Project [3] - Barillas, Guatemala & Marysville, Washington USA - Our project is a multi-part process that will help improve the educational environment and lives of the children around Barillas, Guatemala and within the Marysville Public School System. Studies have shown that early exposure to quality educational computer programs dramatically improve a young child's creative thinking process, thus increasing test scores. Marysville Rotary has been traveling to Guatemala for over 12 years helping to improve the lives of the Mayan children by providing health services, constructing schools and providing books for the villages surrounding Barillas, Guatemala. Our plan is to expand the program with our local High School students writing computer programs in several of the Mayan Spanish dialects, through a Computer Language Programming course. Through this course, we will be providing our local young adults with skills needed in the 21st century, while at the same time creating the useful programming needed to assist the learning of the Mayan students in Guatemala, and increase access to the XO world. In addition, by creating a school XO repair facility, our students will acquire computer and technology skills requested by many corporations in our local geographical area, such as Boeing, Microsoft and Bio-Tech firms.

DevelopWeb-Unleash Web Development: The domain yet to be explored by children is World Wide Web. This activity is a step towards the effort to help them learn Web development starting from basic HTML to complex web development standards and frameworks. DevelopWeb is a Sugar activity being developed aimed to impart Web Development knowledge to children. Through this children can develop web sites through HTML, JavaScript and other latest web technologies. Children can learn quickly how to develop web pages in a step by step approach through examples provided for each HTML/web component. This activity acts like an IDE for Web development where children can select their technology and develop their website or web application.FEATURE_PAGE_ON_SUGARLABS

Offline Lessons for Lesotho Deployments (blog)- Our goal is to provide a complete collection of offline lessons for XO laptop deployments in Lesotho without internet access. Our deployments in Lesotho are in remote areas that have no internet service, so the vast resources found online are not available to them. We will collect, adapt, and/or develop a full school year’s worth of XO laptop lessons for all grades 1-7, starting with math and English. Some lessons will be provided in both English and Sesotho, the local language. The purpose of these lessons is to supplement Lesotho’s national primary school curriculum and textbooks. They will be designed to help enable students to learn more effectively, foster further exploration and learning, and develop the more advanced cognitive skills not currently acquired under the traditional educational system in Lesotho. Our lessons will be designed primarily to be self-taught by the student or a group of students working together. Using the Learn Activity, students will be able to work through the lessons at their own pace.